Many individuals and businesses occasionally have a need for printed materials such as party invitations, announcements of special events, holiday cards, or any number of other items. Rather than settle for off-the-shelf, generic designs, many customers for these types of products wish to personalize the product by incorporating personal images into the product design, such as photographs of family members or other images of particular interest or relevance to the customer.
Some of these individuals and businesses turn to traditional sources such as a local print shop for assistance in preparing customized materials. As an alternative, many people today choose to prepare their own custom designs using a Web-based printing service site, such as VistaPrint.com, that offers users the ability to access the site from the user's home or office and design a personalized product using document design tools and services provided by the site. Printing services Web sites typically provide their customers with the ability to select a desired product template from variety of pre-designed templates, incorporate text and images to create a customized design, and then place an order for production and delivery of a desired quantity of the product.
Some online sites allow a user to incorporate an image into a design template at any aspect ratio, but the image will be displayed in the template without any accompanying frame image. Some users desire their image to appear in a frame and find the absence of a frame to be unattractive. To let users create a design where the user image appears with a frame, some online sites provide templates designed with image containers having the appearance of a frame and specifically intended for the purpose of receiving user images. These types of image containers generally have fixed aspect ratios that cannot be altered by the user, therefore, unless the user's image happens to have the same aspect ratio as the image container into which it is placed, the image will typically have to be cropped so that it completely fills the container to avoid undesirable empty space in the container. If the user image is cropped automatically, the resulting image version may be totally unsatisfactory to the user. If a cropping tool is provided and the user attempts to perform the cropping operation manually, the user may find the process time consuming and may become frustrated if a suitable cropped version of the user image cannot be readily created.
There is, therefore, a need for a flexible electronic image framing system that is not restricted to a predefined, limited set of fixed aspect ratio image containers, but is instead capable of automatically generating frame images around any image regardless of the image aspect ratio.